This little fellow tore up Reddit the other day. According to Paste’s site traffic, it got something like 232K unique views. So, good for me, I guess. It might actually be the most widely-read piece of writing I’ve ever written, ever. I doubt I ever got that many views writing for the Herald & Review of Decatur, Illinois (2010 census population: 76,000). I’ve certainly had way more fun writing other pieces – this one was a rougher go of it, mostly because I wanted to keep things focused on the film adaptation and not wander into the weeds on the book.

I’m careful not to shove in too much apocrypha when I write these articles for Paste, and my editors have been really gracious about letting me write in a way that might seem a little quotidian or overly academic when I dive into some of this stuff. I do it, though, because standards at a lot of entertainment websites are just Not Very Stringent, and you can make a lot of ridiculous-ass claims without backing anything up. Approaching this one, though, was almost too easy: It seems like every damn reviewer has circled back at some point and put on a whole big production about how this silly movie was swinging for the satirical fences and just didn’t quite get a hit.

I mean, look at what the A.V. Club wrote like, years ago now. Check out Rotten Tomatoes, where you can see that its score is buoyed, as I mention in this article, by reviews from the middle of the last decade. I felt a sort of intimidation at knowing I was tackling pretty well-trod territory already, and I had to resist just linking to about half a dozen other (let’s face it, better) articles.

And also, god fuck it, I just don’t want to write about the current political climate at all. I know it’s whining, but I spent a good half a decade writing about what I now regard to be a pretty much inexorable decline in society. It is exhausting to have to drag all of that into my fun writing, but what other choice did I have? How can you watch this movie these days and not marvel at how creepily plausible it is?